Can MailScanner send rejection notices to SPAM senders?

[steveluscher]

I know that you can have MailScanner notify senders of infected mail, but I'm wondering if you can also have it send rejection notices to people who've sent me email that has been identified by spam.

This would be helpful, for instance, if one of your friends using GMail sends you a message, and some SPAM list (such as SpamCop) decides to blacklist all GMail IPs for a while. If the sender got a message, at least they would know that it didn't get through.

Is this even a good idea?

Cheers,
Steve...

 

[Aric1]

It isn't a particularly good idea to do this, since spam uses faked headers (including the From: address). You end up sending messages back to people who aren't spammers and didn't send you a message in the first place or sending the message to an e-mail account that doesn't exist.

Why risk annoying people and putting extra load on your server?

If you use MailWatch with MailScanner you can keep an eye on incoming and outgoing messages and release messages if they were incorrectly tagged as spam and the user didn't receive it because they have MailScanner set to delete spam.

 

[henker]

Please, don't do it.
Excellent article on a similar topic:
http://attrition.org/security/rant/av-spammers.html